This section is intended to introduce the reader to aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the disclosure described herein, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the disclosure described herein. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, such as an SAP system available from the German software corporation SAP® AG, incorporates various databases, servers, and computer based systems in order to manage many internal and external aspects of an organization or company's enterprise level data management requirements in areas such as assets, financing, purchasing, sales, logistics, inventory, and human capital management, among others. Within the ERP system, there is typically an entire landscape of servers and systems ID's that allow for customization and the required testing before IT initiatives are implemented into a live environment.
Within any enterprise or company using these ERP systems, users from many areas of responsibility (i.e. finance, purchasing, sales, logistics, etc.) require prompt access to various types data that reside in the ERP system landscape. However, this data is not readily available in conventional systems or using convention software and methods, whether in raw form or formatted/organized form, through the standard system. Generally, there are limited options available for users to attempt to solve this problem. These options can include using SAP standard reporting platforms (SAP BI/BO/BW/BODS); extract, transform, and load (ETL) platforms provided by various vendors; Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) and SAP Query; and standard SAP export utilities (i.e. manual pulls) such as SQVI and table browsing (SE16, SE16N), among others. However, these options have more disadvantages than advantages. For example, they can be very expensive and hardware intensive, their development lifecycle is very time consuming and expensive, they can be resource intensive and highly specialized, and they typically are not flexible for end users to configure and enhance as them needed.
Hence, what is needed is a simple, cost-effective, quick, and end user customizable method and system for extracting and exporting data within an ERP system and other database systems to an end user that uses minimal software and hardware resources, does not require additional hardware, and does not require additional enterprise system development.